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Reforming Christianity  (Continued)
Don Cupitt, Polebridge Press, 2001

The shocking truth
What is startling is not how previous generations of pre-Enlightenment Christians construed reality and as a consequence formulated their doctrines and organisational structures, but what Christians have done and failed to do in the last 200 years. Burning Christian heretics at the stake has ceased; we no longer hold many heresy trials; every effort is made to be liberal and democratic by a majority of Christians today.

And yet ... what worked in Medieval times and before is preserved to this day, even though it's fossilised absurdities cry out. Cupitt takes the example of Mary to illustrate the profoundly shocking truth that she is "holy" because she is "virgin" to millions of Christians even today. 

How is it, he asks, that so many Christian believers still think that

 ...there is something religiously unclean about the normal functioning of the female reproductive apparatus 

and that therefore Jesus could not have been conceived and born naturally. The notion of the holy as something separate from and therefore better than "the world" is ancient and venerable. It has borne fruits sweet and bitter and has yielded great saints - and yet it remains utterly wrong for us today.

In the 1960s, says Cupitt, 

... the old notion of the holy suddenly collapsed, and the old notions of pollution ... became unendurable. 

Witness the conversion in a mere 50 years of Britain's old "holy" sites into tourist attractions and something called "heritage". But surely, we might respond, holiness is still something real, something to be sought after? Cupitt agrees. 

What has happened is not that the holy has disappeared but that it has "... become diffused and scattered across the whole human life world". Distinction between the sacred and the profane has largely vanished.

It seems to me that Cupitt is correct in this assertion - though perhaps only with respect to the Western world. About one in six people claim to be Christian, most of them living in less sophisticated societies. Cupitt claims that other features of traditional Christianity have also been swept away:

• That there is a hidden supernatural world alongside ours;
• That absolute truths have been revealed to humankind and handed down to us via traditional doctrines;
• That we need to communicate with and worship spiritual beings through semi-magical rituals.

I personally suspect that a majority of Christians still construe the world as did our Medieval forefathers - while simultaneously living more or less comfortably in a 21st century technological environment and reaping its benefits. 

The Malawian peasant Christian listens to his battery radio, watches occasional films or television, plants and reaps his crops, lives in a mud and grass dwelling - and knows very well that this world is peopled by a multitude of spirits and ghosts, ruled over by a mighty Old Testament God whose son is Jesus and to whom he or she must pray earnestly.

The shocking truth is not that so many modern Christians perceive reality in pre-modern terms, but that educated, clever ecclesiastics the world over conceal from them the fruits of contemporary scholarship and thought - presumably at one level to avoid offence and dispute, and at another to prevent leakage of Christians into other faiths or secular agnosticism.

This leads Cupitt to admit that he cannot develop 

.... within ecclesiastical theology and on its own terms an argument that will push the Church into reforming itself beyond itself and into the kingdom. 

His apologetic therefore can't appeal to tradition or ecclesiastical authority. In his view - and I agree with him - Christians are called to discover a new vision of Jesus which is true to our own times. A re-jigged old one will not do. But the Church cannot and will not reform itself.

Life is truth
The Church of tradition can't tolerate life in today's terms. That's not Cupitt's statement. It's a conclusion I have drawn from what he says. Anyone who lives life with immediacy knows that risks must be taken, mistakes made and joys savoured, not without thought for the future, but with intense focus.

Perhaps that has always been the true Way. It no longer makes sense to me to think that "salvation" began with Jesus any more than love (agape) began with Paul and the Church. Jesus lived out what has always been true - that God's creation is good and that we are not and cannot be condemned for being human in the full, biological sense of the word. 

The Church today willfully shrinks from the implications of living life in this sense.

Cupitt thinks that the way of immediacy, the way of life was the Way Jesus took. But that wasn't how the Church turned out. The ecclesiastics turned the great myths "outside in" and fashioned them into devices by which an entire cosmology was framed. Of course, if the traditional Christian cosmology is "the way things are round here" then society itself must needs mirror what "really is" according to the reigning cosmology. 

And so the Church became the means by which individuals and therefore society was shaped and controlled in previous ages.

In response to the Church's message that "God has determined and will continue to determine everything by his infinite power" the Christian's right and dutiful response has been to obey and worship.

Looking back from our vantage point, however, we have realised that this is not the way things are for us. Cupitt becomes quite vehement as he discusses the huge differences which have arisen between tradition and a viable contemporary faith. We now know, he writes, that there is no God out there, no life after death, no ready-made morality. We must reform Christianity because 

... it is only when we have fully understood how and why the old kind of Church Christianity is simply untrue as cosmology and historically obsolete

that we can absorb the message that truth is delivered to us by life itself and not by ecclesiastical traditions.

One of the huge differences, says Cupitt, is a fundamentally new way of relating to reality as persons. People once were passive, receptive, almost " feminine" in relation to the Church as God's kingdom on earth. God did all the work. To be human was to be amphibian - part spiritual and destined for heaven or hell, and part animal, immersed in the smells and fluids of biological life.

This difference has hovered in the back of my consciousness for some time. Cupitt describes it with clarity and verve. I and most others I know take as given that self-expression is our right. We are mostly unconscious of the 180 degree turn made by Westerners over the past century or two from self-abasing obedience towards a self-assertive struggle for personal maturity. Self-expression is today the reason, or at least a major reason, we do anything. 

For example, we now perceive work which prevents or stultifies self-expression as intensely negative, to be endured and not celebrated. And so for almost every aspect of life today. Biological drives are no longer perceived as temptations of Satan but as normal, natural ways of being who we are - carrying with them choices and dangers, but normal.

I sense that Cupitt shares my intense irritation with the "Believe and be saved" mantra of so many traditional Christians. Belief in a reality which disconfirms everything we know about life today is silly. Those who propose it appear even sillier. Indeed, I maintain that belief simply isn't the point. I would go so far as to say that an insistence upon belief in this or that respect as "necessary to salvation" (or whatever other trite phrase might be used) is anti-life.

What matters today is not belief but living life to the full. Cupitt calls it a "solar" outlook. Just as the sun blazes furiously down upon the earth in the process giving it life, so Christians are today called to live adventurous, or "solar" lives. 

Like Buddhism, a reformed Christianity recognises that its form and content are not logically dependent upon its historical origins. It may be informed by them, but it isn't ruled by them.

Jam tomorrow
Cupitt argues persuasively that the traditional Church is constitutionally unable to transcend itself. Although its stated purpose is to bring God's Kingdom here on earth, it has so defined itself that this purpose can't be fulfilled. It is stuck with promising jam tomorrow - either when Jesus returns in the last days or (more likely, given the lessons of history) after death. A prime example of this is the present-day papacy: 

Having made an absolute of itself it cannot transcend itself and therefore cannot function properly as religion.

Is a reform of Christianity possible? Liberal champions of reform like Bishop John Spong are, Cupitt thinks, quite severely restrained in what they can do and advocate.

The main reason for what he terms the liberal failure is their attempt to translate traditional Christianity into terms and forms comprehensible to contemporary people. It lacks what the author calls "religious power" because "... every spelling out of a religious doctrine sounds like nonsense ... it's all gobbledygook ... all beginning to sound like the internal jargon of a cult."

This and other reasons for the liberal failure are superceded by a deeper reason - what Cupitt calls (in typical philosophic style) the end of "metaphysical realism". 

By this I think he means that the two-world perception of reality as comprising the natural and the super-natural no longer holds water for a majority in the West. The contemporary mind simply doesn't think that way any longer. What then can take the place of naive realism?

The author's answer is "Left Postmodernism". I found myself having to translate his philosophical formulation in order to make sense in terms of ordinary thought.

The "jam tomorrow" of traditional Christianity, whether or not re-formed by liberals, no longer works for most people - and it will work even less as time goes by. 

The first thing we must realise is that "We are supposed to play God". That is, the word "God" is empty of meaning until we do once again now what humans have always done - infuse it with the way we understand life now. Revelation, apart from being an intellectually untenable proposition, freezes doctrines, cosmologies and liturgies because it claims absolute truth. Unfreezing God requires us to give up "... all doctrinal claims and stop trying to either defend or reform the Church".

It took me a while to understand that, as far as I can tell, Cupitt is not advocating the end of religion as such. He seems to be proposing that only when we cease to hoard precious doctrines and preferred status can religion advance to once more become a vehicle through which humans express their most precious insights, priorities and emotions.

This means that in the next reformation the destruction of symbolic material will have to be on a very much larger scale than last time.

It will require us to discard the "painted veil" which traditionally hangs between us and the eternal, but which in reality protects us from facing the awesome responsibility of choosing our own God.

He asks, "Can we save Jesus?" By which I think he means that "...the historical Jesus is not yet catching on ... I don't mind too much about losing the church and its version of 'Christianity'; but the loss of Jesus is a far more serious blow".

Cupitt has no answer to the possible demise of Jesus that I could find - except to point to a few indications that "...the larger historical drift, in the long term, is favourable to the reformation of Christianity by its gradual evolution into kingdom religion".

I hope he's right. Only time will tell. 

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